India, Feb. 10 -- "The British," the economist Ashok Mitra told the poet Dom Moraes during a conversation, "imposed a unified administration on an area they called India. When they left, we thought we'd continue the colonial experiment, but we called it a democracy." The magnitude of the contradictions that make up both the concept and reality of India has always been the stuff of legend, but Mitra's comment is more radical than that - it points to the fragility of democracy in this nation....